Good. But he’d wasted half a minute filling out stupid forms – now he had to disable the cops’ ability to contact SMASH.
Flux smashed into Paul.
No! he thought. I’d checked the dispatch records! That was a simple request!
YOU WILL LOSE YOUR DAUGHTER IN WAYS YOU NEVER IMAGINED
He was weak, so weak–
And he’d unleashed a tide of bad luck into the room.
Butler tripped. The tea cup tumbled to the floor, shattering both the fine porcelain and Butler’s reassuring spell.
The tea flowed across the floor, directing the officers’ attention to Paul’s artificial foot.
Their eyes widened. An artificial foot and ’mancy meant one man.
Four panicked officers fired at Paul.
“Paul!” Valentine cried, flinging up a blue videogame shield. Bullets sparked off, ricocheting around the room, trailing black streaks as Paul’s flux guided them into the most disastrous targets–
Two bullets smashed into Butler’s thigh. Butler toppled over, blood spurting into the tea.
Paul realized where the other bullets were headed – Imani, trapped by a maniac. An easy target for a stray gunshot.
Except she was encased in that thick blue barrier, shielded from every possible angle by Valentine – who’d realized Paul’s flux endangered Imani the most. Valentine’s eyes bulged as she battled Paul’s bad luck to a standstill–
The bullets rebounded into the cell door’s hinges, shattering them.
An inhuman, silent strength shoved the doorway open.
“Down!” Robert yelled, shoving Valentine and Paul to the floor as the officers whirled to fire on the gray beast erupting from the cell.
Only Officer Sharpe got off a shot.
Flicker. Steeplechase smashed his elbow into Officer Sharpe’s head, her spine shattering, grabbing her gun so quickly her severed fingers bounced off the walls–
Flicker. Steeplechase rammed his forehead through another officer’s skull, the cop’s brains exploding like fireworks as a spray of flux erupted from Steeplechase, and–
Flicker. He stood at the top of the stairwell, flinging the two remaining officers down the stairs until they smashed like eggs against the concrete floor, and–
“Hey!” Valentine cried. “Don’t you fucking leave before tracking Aliyah!”
She reached over her shoulder, grabbing a rifle from an imaginary holster – and produced a spider-like gun humming with plasma energy, so large she grimaced holding up its weight.
Flicker. Steeplechase stood framed at the bottom of the stairwell, kneeling by the two dead policemen he’d murdered, pressing his palm against their cooling chests. He still clutched the stolen gun, but the breaths he drew in were ragged. He cried silently as he looked towards the door, gesturing as though he wanted to explain himself.
Valentine pulled the trigger.
A jagged electrical arc wrapped around Steeplechase’s ankle, hoisting him into the air.
“Gravity gun?” Robert pushed Paul back towards the cell as he pulled a first-aid kit out from his trenchcoat. “Good choice.”
“It’s called the Zero-Point Energy Field Manipulator!” Valentine snapped. Valentine fought for fine control – even slight movements at this distance jerked Steeplechase around at neck-snapping speeds. “Now, you fucking wendigo, you’ll–”
Even upside down and dangling and yanked at random, Steeplechase’s aim was unerring.
Blood fountained from Valentine’s forehead as two conflicting world-views collided in a magical concussion. The impact sent Paul tumbling as he scrambled to check on Imani; Valentine’s gun flew from her hands. Steeplechase smashed into the stairwell.
Being shoved onto a concrete floor had crushed his ribs; only the painkillers allowed him to keep moving. Still, he cried with relief when he saw Valentine alive.
But she crawled with flux.
In Steeplechase’s world, bullets are pure death, he thought dizzily. In Valentine’s endless shoot-’em-up games, bullets are an inconvenience. Their ’mancy just went head-to-head, and Valentine barely survived…
Imani rammed the door away with her shoulder, flipping it over Valentine’s body, using it as an impromptu shield.
“Robert, get on Butler before they bleed out!” Paul felt elated: his wife was alive and barking orders. “Paul, how’s Valentine doing?”
Valentine staggered to her knees, her eyepatch blown off, blood dribbling down into her puckered eyesocket scar.
“That fucker…” She spat pink-tinged phlegm. “He’s not… he’s not getting away…”
Of course Steeplechase had vanished.
She stumbled towards the exit.
“Are you OK?” Paul shook her shoulders, trying to get her attention.
She hyperventilated, blinking, unable to focus on Paul. “That fucker shot me. That…” She swallowed. “It hurt.” She fell to her knees, clutching the door as if she intended to cram it down Steeplechase’s throat. “I’m not gonna fucking lose twice in the same week!”
“Valentine.” Robert’s voice was cool, calm, a paramedic’s command. “I need you here. Butler needs a medpack.”
She wobbled between her lover and the escape route. Then she flicked blood off her fingers. “Sure, sure. I got a little ’mancy to spare before I give that fucker a pistol endoscopy.”
She limped past Robert, headed towards another cell – and Paul almost yelled at her get back here, before remembering Valentine couldn’t just conjure up medpacks. Like any good first-person shooter, she had to hunt for health packs.
Another cloud of flux wreathed Valentine as she silently placed medpacks, pushing her dangerously close to her limit. She can’t fight him, he thought. He believes in his weapon’s deadliness, and whenever she stops his bullets she’s taking on near-fatal levels of flux…
Imani crossed herself as she examined the impossible ruins of each cop’s body.
“This won’t fix Butler,” Valentine said, crouching down beneath a cart to find a glowing white box with a red cross on it. “Remember, these things last half an hour tops.”
“That’s fine.” Robert bent over Butler with surgical scissors, grimacing as he cut off their fine leather pants. “The artery’s nicked. It’ll take major surgery to close it up…”
“Temporary’s better than dead, sure, sure, got it.” She pushed the white box into Butler’s gurgling body; the wound closed shut.
She clutched her head, her flux overflowing. Seeing Valentine lose it filled him with terror – Valentine had never shit the bed on her flux…
A tiny box tumbled from Robert’s vest pocket.
His engagement ring rolled across the concrete to land at Valentine’s feet.
“Oh, no,” she muttered, recoiling in horror. “Oh, no, no, no, you didn’t…”
Robert crouched down to scoop the ring up, inadvertently kneeling before her – and Valentine tripped, falling ass-backwards. “You don’t understand,” he apologized. “I was going to…”
Tears mixed with her blood. “I know what you were going to!”
He took in her terror – then clutched his belly like he’d been punched. He rolled the ring between two fingers, squinting as if he couldn’t believe what he was saying:
“Your bad luck is me proposing?”
“No, baby.” She tensed, ready to flee. “It’s more complicated than that–”
His face contorted in exquisite betrayal. “Your bad luck is me discovering how much you don’t want to be with me?”
“No! Jesus, do you know how happy you make me, you dumb fuck? I want to be with you, you just… you can’t go where I need you to–”
“I’ll go anywhere.”
She clawed tears away. “You say that, but then you won’t come with me!”
He stood up, leaving the ring behind, pulling Valentine to her feet. “Where do you want me? I’ve always stayed a footstep behind you in case you needed me–”
“How would you kno
w what I need, you asshole?” She stared down at her hands wrapped in his as though his fingers were the gentlest of handcuffs, trembling with shock and humiliation. “I just got shot! Maybe you should, I don’t know, paramedic or something! Because you sure can’t go punch that fucker, like you used–”
“Stop it!”
Imani’s voice boomed across the room. She looked so shaken, her weariness highlighted their argument’s extravagance.
“You can…” She wiped her bloodied hands on her skirt. “You can fix your personal issues on your time. Right now, the man who can find Aliyah is getting away.”
Robert frowned at the dead cops. “We wanna sic that on Aliyah? The living murder-tornado?”
Imani traced the claw marks on her wrist. “He… Yeah. I’m not excusing that. But he also slammed me behind a door so I wouldn’t get shot once he went for them. I think he’s sympathetic to our cause, he just can’t…”
She massaged her forehead.
“He can’t not hunt his next target. So Valentine. Find him now. Work out your marital issues on your own time.”
Valentine nodded, conspicuously kicking the ring into Steeplechase’s former cell. Robert pointedly walked away; Paul trotted in to fetch it for them for later.
Steeplechase had etched the same pattern into the wall time and time again – the same snarl of straight lines and curves, repeated up over the ceiling, across the floor…
Valentine pressed her palms together, then irised them open. A Grand Theft Auto radar map bloomed between her hands.
She smiled as a bright yellow dot winked into existence, showing them the path to Steeplechase. Then it flickered out. Valentine shook the map angrily like it was a Magic 8-Ball; the yellow dot faded, then disappeared.
“Fuck!” Valentine smashed the map against the floor; it shattered into dissolving pixels. “His stealth powers are cancelling my mission marker! I- I want to find him, but…”
Paul hunted through Steeplechase’s cell for the ring, understanding. Valentine couldn’t make Steeplechase appear on the map because to Valentine, Steeplechase was a stealth game personified – and in her heart of hearts, stealth targets never appeared on maps.
Valentine couldn’t fake the game. Even if that meant losing Aliyah.
“OK.” Imani drew in a deep breath. “So we freed a maniacal hunter, we got four small town cops killed when they crashed our murder party, we maybe killed Butler, the hunter’s headed towards a target so bad even mobsters shuddered to think of it, and we still don’t know where Aliyah is.”
Paul frowned, looking at the cell walls. He ran his fingertip down one of the curved lines Steeplechase traced.
He’s a bit of a guided missile, sir, Butler had said. Unable to think of anything but his target.
“Aliyah’s still lost.” Paul turned in slow circles, taking it all in. “But…”
He wouldn’t have identified the walls as maps if he hadn’t seen Valentine’s. But now he realized Steeplechase had traced the same selection of streets over and over again…
“We’ve got Steeplechase’s next target.”
Twenty-Two
Trying to Do the Unimaginable
First you destroyed Morehead, Aliyah thought. Now you’ve destroyed the world.
Rifts roared out from Aliyah’s outstretched fingertip, slicing through the air like razors across eyeballs. They cut furrows through the chilled racks of gray fluid, sending waterfalls of goo down to puddle in the dirt; they lopped the wooden mess hall tables into chunks, sending ’mancers and Bastogne locals diving for cover.
She was still trapped in an exaggerated “objection!” pose by her ’mancy – but the rifts vacuumed up power from Aliyah’s spell, devoured it. The living rifts looked like black plows made of razors, rocketing forward in sweeping curves that brushed against the oval mess tent’s nylon walls. They left incisions behind, carving away Earth physics – and the air in front of the tent walls drooped down like peeling wallpaper, revealing seething chaos beyond.
The rifts had trapped everyone inside, turning the great tent into a kill zone.
The Thing in the sky roared, a triumphant subsonic bass that flowed through Aliyah’s bones. She’d opened the doorway for It to step through.
She’d learned nothing from Morehead.
Now she’d set off the chain reaction that would unravel the world.
Having cut off escape, the razor-rifts looped back and crisscrossed the dining hall’s interior, sewing up the great space so no one could flee. The arrow-making family dove behind the black iron stewpot as a trio of rifts homed in on them; the old woman with axe-blistered hands brandished a knife at an incoming rift, holding up what was left of a chair as an impromptu shield.
And one razor-rift arced back around, leaving contrails of mangled physics as it zoomed in on Aliyah.
She watched it chew up the space between them, knowing she deserved this. She’d tried to make friends at the Peregrine Institute, and had instead led a murderer to their doorstep. She’d tried to make friends at Morehead, and had wrecked the town. If she’d turned down Ruth’s invitation, this would never have happened.
The rift narrowed its blades, homing in on Aliyah’s left eye.
She stared it down. She’d watch her demise, and–
Numbers stepped serenely before the incoming menace, flattening his palm against his heart.
He curled his fingers into a fist.
Consensus.
The rift imploded him at the molecular level. Alien physics reduced Numbers to a fourth-dimensional smear of tissue, splattering him like a bug against an extradimensional windshield–
With his dying breath, Numbers enfolded the rift like gift wrapping surrounding a present.
Aliyah looked around; other Unimancers lay dead in front of the Bastogne residents, having sacrificed themselves to protect the mundanes. The black woman who’d reassured her had slid apart, the friction in her body lowered until her individual cells had rolled away like marbles – but the arrow-family stood trembling, alive. The Finnish bodybuilder’s veins had swollen from some unearthly pressure to the size of toy balloons, his muscles splitting open as they burst apart in gory flowers – but the old axe-woman was safe.
The rest stepped in to encircle the rifts, held their hands over their hearts, clenching their fists:
Consensus.
Aliyah felt such a blast of love that her vision blurred before she realized she was weeping.
She’d seen Daddy reknitting the universe after a broach, all fussiness: he believed the world should be orderly, and repaired the world like a watchmaker fitting parts.
But the Unimancers – their faces glowed with affection. They stared into the wrecked physics with the fondness that someone would look at a lover they found begging for change in an alleyway – with adoration, with hands outstretched in forgiveness.
Numbers’ remains flowed outwards, taking root to provide a fulcrum for the remaining Unimancers to shovel in love to seal up this destruction. And as their gazes swept across the rifts, the chewed-up mess tent re-raveled itself, the peeled gaps closed, friction congealed to normality.
Aliyah sank to her knees; there were thousands of Unimancers, and each held a deep love for something on this earth so profound that their adoration had once powered magic. The physicists reminded broken atoms how their electrons should spin. The carpentrymancers’ devotion rebuilt the shattered tables. A gardenmancer remembered the rift-eaten dirt with such intensity that withered plants grew back.
And yet, Aliyah thought, they held each other in restraint. Just as they had collectively assembled a 360-degree view of the mess hall, the Unimancers held a precise understanding of the Earth’s limits. A lone culinomancer might have recreated some magical nourishment from the puddles of ruined gray fluid – but the group mind knew nutrition’s limits, held the culinomancer back so she created normal food and nothing more.
They were each other’s safety mechanism. Daddy’s Contract rerouted flux, i
t didn’t stop ’mancy from spiraling out of control.
They sang as they mended the broaches, repudiating the Thing in the sky, restoring the world to a place where the people of Bastogne could thrive. She felt the Unimancers’ love – a love so potent, they’d sacrifice themselves joyously if it meant others could live.
No wonder the Bastogne villagers adored them.
Then it was over. Aliyah’s hair prickled; the Unimancers had rebuilt the concept of electricity incorrectly, making her eyelids twitch.
She knelt, ready for the executioner’s axe–
Sobbing.
She’d vowed never to cry in front of anyone. But now? She realized why the Unimancers hated her. She realized why they wanted to jail her, torture her, expunge her – everything her father had done to keep her safe was wrong. She deserved to be drugged, she deserved brainwashing…
“Hey.”
Ruth crooked her finger up underneath Aliyah’s chin, forcing her gaze upwards.
Ruth peered at her with the love she’d rained down upon Bastogne.
Her compassion made Aliyah weak.
The Unimancers stood behind Ruth, united in their affection for Aliyah.
“We know,” Ruth said, gesturing back at her people. “We were all scared once, too. We know you can’t stop it. We know this isn’t a choice.”
Ruth grabbed Aliyah in a tight hug, holding her closer than anyone had ever held her before, holding her with the force of thousands.
“This wasn’t your fault,” Ruth whispered. “Nobody can control this alone. And you have been so brave for trying–”
Aliyah broke, wailing with years of exhaustion, realizing all she’d wanted to hear was some stranger admit how hard this was, feeling like some great cyst inside had popped.
The Unimancers moved in to comfort her, a reassuring hand on her shoulder, squeezing her calf, a hug from the collective.
Aliyah lost herself in their touch.
Twenty-Three
The Sunset Gardens Assisted Living Facility
Paul felt his sides twist painfully as he let the flux meld with his own self-hatred. Somewhere deep in his broken ribs, an infection was taking root – something good and painful.
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